Monday, June 16, 2014

A review:

"For the Kingdom and the Power: The Big
Money Swindle That Spread Hate Across America," by Dale W. Laackman.

A detailed history
of the Ku Klux Klan's financial dealings and public image, Dale W. Laackman's
book gathers in one place the truth behind the extensively dirty financial underskirts
of the Klan's first coordinated leaders: a pair of marketing experts who built
the Klan up for personal profit.

Laackman portrays
the rise of Edward Young Clarke Jr. and Elizabeth "Bessie"
Tyler—fellow Klan leaders, marketers extraordinaire and sometime-lovers—who used
the organization first defined by William Joseph Simmons (a minister dedicated
to the concept of white superiority) for fun and profit. From the start of
their involvement with the sleepy, 5,000-member Klan in Georgia, they
conceptualized a large, nationwide Klan, selling hate and bringing in easy
money. And so it went—for some years.

Laackman skillfully
fills in the broad patchwork of information surrounding the Klan's astounding
growth to nearly a half-million white men dedicated to the exclusion of blacks,
Catholics, Jews, immigrants and any other non-white, non-native species of
mankind. The Klan did, however, include women as members at one point, both to convey
a reputation as a social organization and to publicly exploit its
progressiveness in having a female leader (Tyler, who ran things in the shadows
for years).

The Klan's roots
extend from post-Civil War decades to the present, though the numbers are back
down to around 5,000 in estimates from the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2012.
In the course of its growth as an ostensibly benign fraternal organization, the
Klan has executed murders, beatings, political control and terror. Laackman
doesn't focus on the individual crimes and misdoings, already well documented
in other books. Instead, he details the careful shaping of a financial empire
built on the profit from hatred—money used for the personal benefit of its
founders.

Relying strongly on
material gleaned from histories, legal hearings and extensive newspaper coverage,
Laackman portrays a brilliant marketing campaign, boosted by the blockbuster
1915 movie, "The Birth of a Nation," and nurtured by American
suspicion of immigrants and Papists. "Bessie" Tyler herself came from
an innocent-sounding movement titled "Better Babies," in the early
1900s, which embraced standards for valuing human worth—linked to the now-infamous
but once popular Eugenics movement later linked to Nazi practices. (Plant
breeder Luther Burbank even opposed immigration, claiming it diluted the human
race with inferior stock.)

Clarke had a mixed
record, including fraudulent financial operations within church organizations.

They were a match
for the ages, and their impact together certainly proved that true. Laackman's
story of the public relations firm they founded, the Southern Publicity
Association, and its growth into the financial foundation of the Klan, is
carefully framed and meticulously documented. They modeled pure hatred on the
popular fraternal organizations of the time, using that to mask its purposes
and dedicating the Klan to the preservation of societal goals like the
protection of womanhood (from non-whites, we assume) and continued segregation
(elevated to near slavery in practice).

At various points,
disenchanted Klansmen (and, some say, undercover reporters from the North),
spilled the beans on the Klan's money-making scheme and exposed it, but
Congressional hearings on the accusations, following detailed newspaper coverage,
led nowhere—officially. This may have been because a Georgia congressman
introduced legislation to force Congress to investigate all fraternal
oranizations at the same pitch and level as the Klan had just experienced.

It's not a pretty
story, but it's a fascinating recounting of the many anti-Black realities that
led to the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s, which finally broke the back of
segregation laws and the Klan. Along the way, the reader glimpses lives involved
in the battle between pro- and anti-Klan forces: reporters and publishers,
whistleblowers, legislators. The best of early newspapering is on stage as well.

Also revealed is the
infighting and various machinations the Klan leaders took to hide their misdeeds
and keep the Klan viable, even while they were exposed for earlier frauds and
grievous social misbehavior involving brothels, alcohol, and arrests. Laackman
describes it well as a family "dog fight." The Klan was a broken
organization, though hate was not eradicated and some membership exists today.

Anyone interested in
the inner workings of the Klan, the impacts of greed and fraud on an
organization, the power of public persuasion that is tapped by expert public
relations and the best of early newspapering will find it in "For the
Kingdom and the Power." The book was released in May by S. Woodhouse
Books, a new imprint of Everything Goes Media, a Chicago-based non-fiction publisher.
It's available as a book and e-book.

Laackman received a
bachelor's degree in history and a bachelor's in advertising with a master's in
television and film. He worked in television, writing, directing and producing,
before turning to historical research and writing. He lives in Chicago and this
is his first book.